Place · Hindu Shahi temple · Pakistan
Malot Temple
A red sandstone temple and gateway of about 980 on a cliff edge in the Salt Range, built in an idiom that belongs to Kashmir and not to the Punjab: fluted pilasters, trefoil arches set in gabled niches, a pyramidal roof. The Hindu Shahis who raised it ruled from Kabul and then from Hund, and Malot marks how far south their architectural taste travelled. Both structures are cracked and leaning where the escarpment beneath them has given way.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 32.683, 72.800
Worth knowing
The trefoil-arch-in-gable motif here is the same one used at Mārtānd in Kashmir, three hundred and fifty kilometres north-east across the Pir Panjal — the clearest architectural signature the Shahi realm left.
Connections (4)
- Architectural modelMārtānd Sun Temple
Malot is Kashmiri architecture three hundred and fifty kilometres from Kashmir, across the Pir Panjal. The trefoil arch set within a gabled niche, the fluted pilasters, the pyramidal roof — these are the elements of Mārtānd and of the Kashmiri temple group generally, and at Malot they are executed in Salt Range sandstone instead of Kashmiri limestone. The Hindu Shahis who built it around 980 had ruled from Kabul and then from Hund on the Indus, and this is the clearest surviving statement of how far their architectural taste reached south.
- In the same set asAmb Temples, the Soon valley
Malot, Amb, Katās Rāj and Nandana are the Salt Range group: Hindu Shahi temples of the seventh to tenth centuries strung along an escarpment that was the dynasty's frontier against Ghaznavid pressure from the west. They share the Kashmiri-derived detail and, mostly, a fortified setting, because they were garrison sites as well as shrines. Amb's larger temple, rising through storeys of blind arcading, is among the tallest Shahi buildings left standing anywhere; Malot's is the most complete in its plan.
- In the same set asKatās Rāj
Katās Rāj and Malot stand about sixty kilometres apart on the same Salt Range escarpment and belong to the same Hindu Shahi building programme, though Katās Rāj's temples were repaired and added to for far longer and its sacred tank keeps a living pilgrimage. Malot was abandoned early and kept its Kashmiri detail unaltered as a result. The pair shows the two fates available to a Shahi temple: continuous Hindu use into the present at one, and undisturbed tenth-century fabric on a collapsing cliff edge at the other.
- In the same set asKāfir Kot & Bilot
Kāfir Kot and Bilot on the Indus, and Malot and Amb on the Salt Range, are the two concentrations of Hindu Shahi temple architecture that survive, and they mark the two arms of the dynasty's territory after it lost Kabul. The idiom is the same in both — trefoil arches in gabled niches, fluted pilasters, a Kashmiri vocabulary executed in local stone — and both sit inside fortification walls, because these were frontier garrisons as much as shrines. The Indus group is the larger and the less visited.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Malot Temple”. Punjab archaeology department records; Michael Meister and M. A. Dhaky, Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture, on the Shahi group.
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